RGSoC is intrinsically connected to its community. Each and every person who is part of the program is at least one of the following: student, coach, mentor (aka project maintainer), supervisor, donor and organizer.
This means that RGSoC's work is dependent on the support of the community at all levels. And if RGSoC wants to grow, the community has to grow with it and be actively engaged.

After 3 editions people and especially sponsors and individual donors might get fatigued or invest their money in another place. We needed to make sure everyone knew how important their support was for the program and the impact they had on the student's career advancements and in diversifying tech.

Just like any other organization formed by volunteers, RGSoC's team didn't have enough time to focus on social media and creating content. This was harming their reach and interactions on social networks, the number of visits to the website and preventing them from getting to a bigger audience of students, coaches, project maintainers, sponsors and individual donors.

The good news: RGSoC's community is awesome! RGSoC has one thing that many organizations wish they had: a supportive community that believes in them and in what they do. This could increase exponentially the results of our efforts if we, for instance, improved the content on social media.

When I joined RGSoC, the team mentioned that they would like to improve our marketing and communications. I couldn't agree more! RGSoC is such a fantastic project that I believe it would benefit everyone to know more about it.

Looking at Twitter and Facebook, I realized that there was room for an improvement regarding the number of followers and he posts' engagement KPIs. Facebook was particularly underused, as the types of posts were mostly links and Facebook works best with a bigger variety of content, especially images and videos.

Even though I was present when we launched the crowdfunding campaign, I was only able to focus on social media when we launched the "Extra Week for Projects Submission" and "Applications are Open" campaigns. I followed up later on the crowdfunding campaign as you will see in the next section.

In terms of marketing and communication, each announcement requires multiple social media publications complemented with newsletters, blog posts and direct emails. These announcements had to get to as many people as we could, so I really wanted to do different types of posts.

In February 2016, the team published the first post for the fundraising campaign. It was inspired on the previous year's campaign and after the initial posts we also translated and published our announcement in over 20 languages with the help of the community.

Weeks later, we decided to re-activate the campaign in order to reach our goal of funding 12 teams. After some thought, I believed that we could go beyond on this campaign: we could gather in one place everyone who is part of RGSoC, — students, coaches, mentors, donors and sponsors, — we could show them that their support had an impact in the community and most of all, we wanted to thank them in a genuine and heartfelt way for their support.

And this was how the RGSoC's Thank You Board and the #diversifytech campaign were born.

RGSoC's Thank You Board "under construction" for the 2016's crowdfunding campaign (TY = "Thank You" in internet slang).

I believe that good marketing is not just about ads, PR and social media. Every time a person interacts with your brand is an opportunity to create a new/stronger connection. Support and Operations are two areas where we can go beyond the work done on other channels, create customer loyalty and bring more value to the people who are using the products or services.

I was in charge of students' and sponsors' support during the program. I ensured everyone got quick replies, whether they were reaching us through email, facebook messages or slack; I also focused on automating repetitive tasks and create guides/documents that could be reused on the following editions.

I would try to go the extra mile so that the students felt supported and that the sponsors knew that we really appreciated them being part of RGSoC. For instance, I co-organized a remote meditation session with a Team in Berlin and a Monk in Thailand. I also helped create a bunch of newsletters to keep the sponsors updated and create communication channels between them and the students. I also helped create feedback forms and review the answers.

The tools we used were Slack, GitHub (for task management and guides), Trello, Google Docs, Dropbox, MailChimp and HelpScout. Besides all of this, I tried to create as many guides as possible about the areas of my responsibility.

RGSoC had a press page in 2013, however, it hadn't been updated and the team decided to remove it from the website some time after. In 2016 we decided to redesign it, create press releases and organize the content into new sections. We also created a press kit folder in Dropbox so that the press releases and other media (logos, images and videos) could easily be downloaded. You can check the page here.

When Anika invited me to be a supervisor I was so happy! The team I was supervising was a volunteering team from Singapore, Team Reactives. Tu An and Shwetha did the best they could to work on Sonic Pi while managing university classes and other projects.

The team was separated by 8 hours, as the mentor (Joseph) and me lived in Europe and the students and coaches (Arrchana, Vanchi and Stewart) lived in Singapore. We used slack, google docs and trello to communicate and manage their tasks. We also had team calls every two weeks and the coaches and mentor were really dedicated to making sure Tu An and Shwetha learned and had a great SoC.

I also had to check up on them on the Teams App and follow up on the RGSoC extra activities. I really enjoyed getting to know all of them, and even though there were some issues I believe we came through all of them as a team. I hope to see all of them in a conference and see Tu An and Shwetha kicking-ass!

Team Reactives: On top the students, Tu An and Shwetha, on the tiny pictures Arrchana (coach), Joseph (mentor), Stewart (coach), Vanchi (coach) and me (supervisor).

Overall I believe we can say that we were able to connect and involve the RGSoC community, while at the same time reaching most of our goals and surpassing incredibly the KPIs we had aimed at our social media accounts and website traffic.

Regarding Twitter, I am happy to say that in less than a year, RGSoC's account increased its impressions 3x and the number of followers by 41%. In May of 2016, the impressions broke all the records, reaching 36 times the impressions of May from the previous year, even though we had this peak in May and June, we saw an average growth of 84% in the rest of the year.

On Facebook, when we compare 2015 and 2016, the organic reach was up 6x and the interactions by 5.4x, even though the number of followers just 75%. The Thank You Board Campaign was mainly focused on Twitter, so it didn't impact our Facebook results. The top posts on Facebook were related to the launch of the applications, alumna interviews, albums of events during the program and useful tips for the summer of code.

Our website saw a rise in the number of new sessions (8%) and pageviews (19%), with a bounce rate lowering and returning visitors raising 65%. This might show that the work done to improve the website had some impact on our website users. I am also excited to say that social media became the number one source of user acquisition, having raised 204%.

I met Ana Sofia Pinho through a common acquaintance who was a student and volunteer of our summer program Rails Girls Summer of Code. Throughout her work for RGSoC from March 1st to September 30th 2016, I had the opportunity to work closely with her as part of the team I managed. As part of her work responsibilities, Ana was in charge of marketing and PR as well as primary communication (customer support) with our students and sponsors.

Ana is a very creative and hands-on person. In her time as a team member of RGSoC, she created beautiful targeted content for our audience and was incredibly helpful and empathetic to everyone she communicated with, including students and sponsors. She loves helping people and always goes the extra mile to do so. She is able to work independently, and brings enthusiasm and dedication to her work.

I recommend Ana for a position in marketing, customer support, or anything that involves creativity and/or customer interaction.

Laura Gaetano, Core Organizer of RGSoC

This #RGSoC 2016 video made by @AnaSofiaPinho totally made me cry tears of joy at today’s event at @soundcloud. <3

@AnaSofiaPinho you make a lot of people very happy with your amazing work. THANK *YOU*, so much, for being part of this :)

Sven Fuchs, Founder of RGSoC, on this Twitter thread